KAREN GERNANT and CHEN ZEPING have translated four previous books by Can Xue: Blue Light in the Sky (2006), Five Spice Street (2009), Vertical Motion (2011), and Frontier (2017). Gernant, professor emerita of Chinese history at Southern Oregon University, and Chen, professor of Chinese linguistics at Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, have been translating contemporary Chinese fiction for more than twenty years. In addition to their work with Can Xue, they have published a collection of stories by Zhang Kangkang (2011), a volume of stories by Alai (2012), and two novellas by Zhang Yihe (2017).